Baz Luhrmann's Leading Lady

Ready to go gaga for Gatsby? Meet Catherine Martin, the woman behind the most fashionable movie of the year

"You're supposed to be on holiday, Mom!" announces Catherine Martin's seven-year-old son, William. In his Breton-stripe T-shirt, a smear of chocolate on one cheek, the child is an exact, rumple-haired replica of his father, the director Baz Luhrmann. And Mini Baz is taking aim at me with a (thoroughly harmless-looking) toy bow and arrow.

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"No, no, stop trying to kill her," admonishes Martin, turning back to me with a 360-degree roll of her big blue eyes. "Isn't he funny?" she says drolly. "Now, about the ethereal…."

Martin picks up at the exact word at which she'd left off some minutes before—something about the historical accuracy of Carey Mulligan's first dress in this month's long-awaited extravaganza The Great Gatsby. As the film's production and costume designer, Martin speaks with the acumen of a museum curator, but it's perhaps her unswerving focus that is most impressive. Then again, this is a woman who has been conjuring—and, more to the point, managing—a distinctive brand of madcap genius for some 25 years. Luhrmann makes rollicking, high-octane movies that go off like the pop of a champagne cork, loud and thrilling. And at his side, always, is Martin, his coconspirator from the earliest inklings of story and character down to the last flourishes on the movie poster.

The couple has subjected Shakespeare to the whizzing bullets of a modern-day dystopia (Romeo + Juliet), set a nineteenth-century cancan to the strains of Nirvana (Moulin Rouge!), and fearlessly tackled the Outback-size origin story of their homeland (Australia). Now—with Mulligan as the maddening socialite Daisy Buchanan; Leonardo DiCaprio as the elusive Jay Gatsby, whose entire self-invented existence is an elaborate scheme to win her; and Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway, the Midwesterner invited into Gatsby's world but never really of it—they are taking on (in 3-D, no less) what is arguably the most classic of American novels, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

"You can't divide them, CM and Baz. They blur—he helps her; she helps him," says fellow Aussie Nicole Kidman, star of two Luhrmann epics, Moulin Rouge! and Australia. As far as Martin and Luhrmann are concerned, however, the line of demarcation is clear: The director, 50, is the visionary, the big dreamer, the story driver. Martin, 48, is the pragmatist, the one charged with bringing his schemes, no matter how wacky, to life. Over the course of a career, you come up with many ways to describe such an arrangement: "Baz is the author, the one who generates the kernel of the idea, and I'm an applied artist," is one way Martin puts it. Or, "He's driving the motorbike, and I'm in the sidecar."

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For his part, Luhrmann says CM—the nickname he gave her over two decades ago, now her standard appellation—is "my council on everything, my number-one debater, and my first-ever audience." She's also the person with the no-nonsense gumption to make it all happen. "She's a general in the field," he says, marveling. "I've seen her with some of the burliest building guys telling her, 'Well, love, we'll never be able to put a house in the jungle like that,' and next thing you know there's helicopters and moving trucks."

In terms of storytelling, Luhrmann's visual feasts have always been polarizing—gorged on by many, too rich for some—but the visuals themselves are undeniably remarkable. So while her husband gets the public credit for 99 percent of their work, it's Martin who has thus far earned some of the biggest accolades from critics. The pair of Oscars in their house, both for Moulin Rouge!, bear her name.

Martin sees herself primarily as a translator, turning "ideas that live in the ephemeral world into a concrete reality." It's a skill she attributes in part to growing up with an Australian father and a French mother. "I was always translating—English to French or French to English," she says, "and I've noticed that's what I've ended up doing."

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Whereas Luhrmann was raised in the country, his father an owner of a gas station and a pig farm, his mother a ballroom-dancing teacher (hence Strictly Ballroom, the low-budget gem that put them on the map in 1992), Martin's parents were both academics. They met at the Sorbonne, in Paris, where her mother was studying mathematics and her father was on his way to becoming an expert on eighteenth-century French literature. She and her brother grew up in Sydney but logged significant time with their grandparents in the Loire Valley, visiting "every art gallery, every museum" along the way. At age six, she begged her mother to teach her to use the sewing machine. By 15, she was devising her own knitting patterns and making herself dresses. Her mind goes straight to the making of a thing, no matter what the thing may be: One of her first questions for me—to which I had only the lamest reply—was, "Where is ELLE printed?"

Luhrmann scouted Martin in 1987, when she was a student at their shared alma mater, Sydney's National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA). He was a renegade owner of an opera company, half the age of his performers. Her first impression? "He's totally crazy, and what kind of name is Baz, anyway?" But in their first conversation, "we talked about art, about life. We connected on this profound level, and I felt challenged." Not that he gave her a job on the spot. "I was mortified," she says. "He was kind of, 'Well, you know, I'll call you.' And I'm thinking, Call me?!"

Tina Tyrell

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As for the romance, they remember that differently too. Martin recalls an infuriating moment several months into working together when she cornered him with, "Look, what is happening here?" Luhrmann, ever the writer (and editor) of love stories, says it was always meant to be. They married in 1997, on the stage of the Sydney Opera House—two national treasures, taking vows in the most iconic spot in the country—with the lit-up l'amour sign from their Australian production of La Bohème as a backdrop. She wore a Bianca Jagger–inspired white tux; he wore navy Prada. The production was officiated by the theater's technical director, "a rather large man who looks like Henry VIII," she says, who swooped in on a high wire, wearing an angel costume, complete with tutu. In 2003, their circus expanded to include a daughter, Lillian; William made his arrival in 2005.

Gatsby has all of the hallmarks of a Luhrmann-Martin tale: a beautiful world underpinned by darkness, brilliant clothes, raucous parties, tragic death. And a love story. "I look at all of the films we've made—what is being expressed, right?" Martin says. "It's all about love, about overcoming oppression, about being an outsider who learns not to mind being outside of the square. Human stories that need to be told and retold."

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This is their mission: to take a story so iconic that it's almost untouchable and give audiences a new reason to connect to it. To Martin, the irony of Luhrmann's reputation for being irreverent, even reckless, with his source material—plenty of Gatsby purists' red flags shot up at the mere mention of Luhrmann's name, never mind the 3-D factor, or the soundtrack collaboration with Jay-Z—is the considerable energy they both expend getting to the heart of the original texts. "There are enormously passionate discussions—some people would say arguments," she says wryly, "about the essence of the characters, who we think they are."

As they see it, Gatsby—set in the summer of 1922 and foreshadowing the crash of '29—is timely, on both a personal scale (they now, like Nick Carraway, are transplants in New York, viewing their adopted home as both insiders and outsiders) and a social one. "The disappointment of the American dream; the crash compared to the financial crisis of today," she says. "And this idea of morality: Who is good; who is bad? Is Gatsby essentially a good character?"

Self-described "research junkies," they spent two years getting to know "that slender, riotous island," as Fitzgerald put it. They booked a Great Gatsby Boat Tour of Manhasset Bay, which separated the fictional towns of East and West Egg. They found the house where Fitzgerald holed up to write part of the book. They plundered the costume archives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the archives of Tiffany & Co. (one of several fashionable partners on the film, the jeweler provided glittering hair ornaments for Mulligan).

Time and again, Martin went back to the book, sucking the marrow of every detail. She read and reread the chapter in which Tom Buchanan, Daisy's moneyed husband, has been playing polo and comes to dinner without changing. "I just kept thinking, That can't be right! He must have gotten changed for dinner." So she called an academic who specializes in clothing in Fitzgerald's text—yes, such an individual exists—and got her answer: It was part of "upper-class casualization," Martin says. The '20s weren't all bugle beads and marabou feathers; the decade also marked the advent of casual prep, the polo shirt, the chino. Tom's clothes signaled the new modernity of sportswear, a rejection of the stuffiness of Europe. And at the same time, polo clothes at dinner "showed you were of the better classes, that you had enough money to participate in sport."

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And that's the thought process that went into one outfit. For Gatsby, Martin oversaw 229 scenery makers and a team of 84 working on thousands of costumes, up to 800 of which were custom-made. Longtime collaborator Miuccia Prada supplied another 40 showstopping dresses—reworked designs from the archives of Prada and Miu Miu, including Mulligan's ballet-pink number, weighted with countless chandelier fobs that "worked so brilliantly in 3-D, with those big crystals," Martin says.

They could have just celebrated the '20s explosion of wealth and glitz—but that's not the Luhrmann-Martin way. For the legendary party scenes, Martin conjured a garden of earthly delights, with some 250 actors (filmed to look like a crowd of 1,000), five-foot-tall champagne bottles symbolizing the alcoholic excess of Prohibition, and a manic wide shot inspired by the dark, biblical-themed paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. "We tried to create this sparkly, crazy bacchanal," says Martin. "To reveal the excess in a beautiful but sinister way." Generations of readers have longed to be invited to one of Jay Gatsby's parties. Now all of us are.

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